Sunday, August 3, 2008

Product Review: Adam Makovicz - The New World

Over the past few weeks we've been going through the Virtuoso Performance PianoSoft series, updating information about them on our site and featuring them prominently. These are easily some of the finest titles recorded for the disklavier.

One of these, Adam Makovicz's "The New World", features not just the beautiful playing plus excellent tone and control of other titles in the series, but new and interesting arrangements of classic jazz standards. Known mostly as an accomplished classical pianist, Makovicz here tries his hand at a dozen classics including"Caravan" and "My Favorite Things."

Listen to his take on the iconic "My Favorite Things."

(The above sample requires the Quicktime Plugin to play. If you can't see an audio player you can download Quicktime for free here.)

The playing could easily be too busy and distracting but instead the feeling is virtuosic without being too showy. It achieves a really haunting and beautiful effect, a brilliant and elegant reworking of a familiar melody.